A useful, easy-to-follow guide to making the humble office anniversary party into a meaningful and memorable event.
Joi encourages managers to make workers feel appreciated and happy in this enthusiastic primer.
The author, an organizational psychologist, extols yearly celebrations of a worker’s hiring as a way to imbue an employee with a sense of purpose, belonging, and organizational support, which, he asserts, could help improve job performance by 56 percent and reduce sick days by 75 percent. Joi offers a systematic approach to making these celebratory events more impactful. He devotes much thought to the logistics of remembering anniversaries by way of start-date databases and automated notification programs that remind everyone from HR to the CEO’s secretary of a worker’s upcoming anniversary. He includes an extensive section on anniversary gifts (company-logoed apparel is good; lottery tickets are bad, because the recipient will feel disappointed and resentful when they don’t pay off; don’t give one employee a Rolex unless you give everyone a Rolex). The author details useful anniversary party roles and tips for everyone in the company, from graphic designers (make sure you spell the name right on the congratulatory certificate) to the IT department (ask employees if they need a new monitor, chair, or other equipment, then deliver it on the anniversary). Joi goes on to explore the work anniversary as a tool for the company’s social and cultural development. He recommends that managers prepare statements of praise and thanks for employees’ anniversaries, and that executives use the occasion for “skip-level” conversations with lower-level workers to listen to their gripes and mentor them on their careers; on the wilder side, he suggests staging over-the-top anniversary bonding rituals, like having a manager get on his knees to offer the employee a favorite snack. As an added bonus, Joi notes, the marketing department can use anniversary photos of happy, energetic employees to showcase the staff to prospective clients.
The book is in part a nuts-and-bolts how-to for staging work anniversaries, one that’s brimming with tips on everything from the tax implications of gift-giving to the syncing up of anniversaries with raises and performance reviews, all organized in helpful checklists and timelines and conveyed in lucid, straightforward prose that spells everything out. (“before anyone starts to eat, call out, ‘Two, four, six, eight! Whose sevenyears with XYZCorpdo we appreciate?’ and have everyone respond with the person’s name. Then say, ‘Let’s eat!’”). Joi also advances a humanistic management theory that views the employees’ psychic engagement as the key to a productive workplace and draws canny psychological insights from it: “Thinking bigger, work anniversaries have more power for an organization than birthdays because they’re uniquely about the relationship between the organization and the employee. They’re celebrating the moment the relationship began.” The prescription of cut-and-dried corporate protocols to foster deep, unfeigned social connectedness can sometimes feel a bit discordant: “On each employee’s work anniversary, authentically express—with details—how the employee is a uniquely valued member of the team. Say it. Write it. Smile it genuinely. Hug them, pat them on the back, or shake their hand (as appropriate).” Still, readers will find here a wealth of practical advice for making anniversaries more gratifying.
A useful, easy-to-follow guide to making the humble office anniversary party into a meaningful and memorable event.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9798988345435
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Quintriple Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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